Austerlitz

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 21-50

Pages 51-82

Pages 83-113

Pages 114-132

Pages 133-158

Pages 159-201

Pages 202-244

Pages 245-275

Pages 276-290

Pages 291-310

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Pages 276-290Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 276-283 Summary

Austerlitz continues that, when he first lived in Paris as a student at the end of the 1950s, he devoted himself entirely to his studies—a devotion that became a lifelong habit. He tells the narrator about that time:

Every day, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, he follows the footnotes of the books he read to other footnotes, in an endless chain of research that reveals many obscure facts. Austerlitz eventually sees a short film about the library called Toute la mémoire du monde (All the World’s Memories), which includes a scene of messages traveling through the library via a system of pneumatic tubes. This scene reveals both the nature of the library and the function of Austerlitz’s and the other scholars’ daily work: “the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn” (276).

One day in the library, Marie de Verneuil (then a stranger to Austerlitz) notices Austerlitz’s despondency and invites him to coffee. They talk about their shared interest in architectural history. Marie tells Austerlitz about her visit to an enormous paper mill built on a bend of a deep, green river in Charente. In the half-light of the vast mill, two brothers transform old paper and rags into clean, blank sheets. Marie describes the feeling of hearing the river’s soft sound outside and seeing the bars of sunlight falling through the building: “you wish for nothing more but eternal peace” (278). To Austerlitz, this story expresses the core of Marie’s being and everything she comes to mean to him.

On weekends, Austerlitz photographs the empty streets in the outskirts of Paris. He reflects to the narrator that the streets mirrored his state of mind at the time. On one of these trips, Austerlitz visits a veterinary museum containing oddities and preserved specimens from the 18th and 19th centuries. The pièce de résistance is an écorché by the 18th-century French anatomist Honoré Fragonard: the vitrified bodies of a man on a horse, both flayed to expose their underlying structures. Austerlitz suspects Fragonard—who didn’t believe in an immortal soul—dissected over 3,000 bodies in his lifetime in the hope that transforming decaying flesh into glass conferred some degree of immortality.

Pages 284-290 Summary

On his way home from the veterinary museum, Austerlitz experiences the first fit of amnesia that doctors later diagnose as “hysterical epilepsy.” He’s admitted to the fortress-like Salpêtrière hospital, where for several days he hallucinates throngs of ghosts in a catacombic labyrinth of Métro stations, who “were crouching on the stony floor and, turning silently towards one another, ma[king] digging motions with their earth-stained hands” (285).

The hospital staff cannot identify Austerlitz because his amnesia prevents him from speaking coherently; however, they find Marie’s address in Austerlitz’s notebook and contact her. She helps Austerlitz regain his speech and memory over the span of weeks. He recalls a dreamlike memory of looking at a poster in a Métro station depicting a happy family on vacation in Chamonix; at the time, he felt the pain of something repressed trying to surface.

When Austerlitz is discharged from the hospital, he resumes his walks with Marie. On one walk, they see a girl trip on her overlarge raincoat while skipping rope. Marie had this exact accident at the exact place 20 years prior, an accident that provoked her first presentiment of death.

On another walk through the gare d’Austerlitz and the quai d’Austerlitz, Marie and Austerlitz enter the tent of a traveling family circus. After the final act, the lights are extinguished, revealing a canopy of luminescent painted stars. The entire Bastiani family troupe, accompanied by a white goose, enter and begin playing a piece of music. Though music has never affected Austerlitz, this piece—which seems to morph from one style to another, expressing a wide range of emotions—moves him deeply. The white goose appears aware of its own existence as it stands silently amidst the troupe, “as if it knew its own future and the fate of its present companions” (290).

Pages 276-290 Analysis

Austerlitz’s description of his student days in Paris—where he escaped to after fleeing England—shows an early interest in the topics of memory and history. His vision, prompted by the film of the Bibliothèque Nationale as a kind of organism fueled by scholarship, illustrates that history (and by extension family history) requires work to be saved from oblivion. History only exists insofar as it is remembered, and it takes effort to prevent pieces of the past from slipping away.

These pages continue the themes of the nature of time and the possibility of escaping its ceaseless stream. Marie’s description of the paper mill evokes a feeling of timelessness; the working brothers, the mill, and the setting feel as though they could exist anytime in the past millennium. Marie’s hope for “nothing more but eternal peace” reflects this timeless idyll but also the unspoken fact of her imminent departure (278)—the fact she cannot remain in that idyll.

Austerlitz interprets an attempt to escape mortality in the vitrified écorché by Fragonard. The figure on horseback is preserved as glass, but in contrast to the peaceful atmosphere of eternity that suffuses the mill, a panicked one surrounds the écorché: “every strand in the tensed muscles of the rider and his mount, which was racing forward with a panic-stricken expression, was clearly visible in the colors of congealed blood” (282). The tensed muscles and the panic sculpted in blood convey a sense of frozen terror and violence.

Austerlitz’s hospitalization for an episode of amnesia—chronologically his first—indicates the memorial nature of his affliction. His melancholy memory of the Métro station poster depicting a happy family symbolizes his repressed grief over losing his own happy family as a child. During this hospitalization, his visions are of the underground labyrinth of Métro tunnels and include fallen soldiers’ ghosts “ma[king] digging motions with their earth-stained hands” (285); this symbolizes his need to excavate his past.

Marie’s déjà vu of the girl falling while skipping rope suggests the possibility that, in some way, the past repeats itself. Marie’s fall, having occurred in the exact way and place 20 years prior, is consequential: “an incident which at the time seemed to her shameful and aroused in her the first premonitions of death” (287). It is as if Marie has passed the fate of this fall onto another girl, as if this fall is destined to repeat throughout the course of time.